My experience with Anno 117: Pax Romana begins rather absurdly. I’m in a genuinely ancient building full of exposed brickwork and sandstone that has stood for millennia. Inside this age-old architecture stands an array of modern PC rigs and monitors, loaded with the latest entrant to the long-running economic strategy series, Anno.
Pax Romana puts you in the shoes of a newly appointed governor charged with establishing a settlement in a time of Roman Peace. You will need to attract residents, keep them happy, build a thriving economy, and manage concerns from outside influences to stay in the good graces of Rome’s emperor. You do this by placing buildings, managing resources, tracking your people’s happiness, and eventually expanding through trade or military means.
As vain as it might be to say, the first thing that struck me upon starting a session was how incredible this game looks. Oceans shine with a fantastical glimmer. Light bounces amongst mountain peaks like something out of high fantasy. Grasses and forests sway in the wind. The day and night system is entirely cosmetic, and I sat for a few minutes mesmerised, just changing up the time of day and watching the environmental lighting react.
This seems like a place I’ll enjoy spending the next few hours.
I had a helpful in-game guide who instructed me to claim this new island by placing my Governor’s Villa. From here, they suggested that a new settlement will need wood to build new structures, so I built a woodcutter’s shack and sawmill. I then discovered the importance of a good road, supplies can’t get where they need to go without it. Sawmills aren’t very useful without workers to operate them, so I built some residences for people to live in, and suddenly, I had a population of people with needs to manage.
There’s a pleasantly comfortable feeling to the opening hours of an Anno 117 settlement. You have decisions to make, but the game’s many advisors are with you every step of the way to help you get to grips with the systems of economy and management present here. Every action logically flows into the next in a way that makes sense, and isn’t overwhelming in the initial stages.
That’s not to say there isn’t complexity by any stretch. You’ll soon find that as you follow through advances in your settlement, sometimes, the next step is two or three different steps you could take.
Once you have people in your settlement, you need to make sure they stay happy. As you progress into later kinds of supply and social buildings, you’ll find that many of them can have positive and negative effects on their surroundings. Placing a university filled with students pursuing knowledge radiates knowledge to the residences around it. People will love living in the vicinity of a lavender field, but chuck a pig farm next to their house and they might grow to hate you.
Clayworks, on the other hand, work well with high-temperature kilns. You’d better make sure to have some firefighters stationed nearby, however, because any building nearby is at higher risk of catching fire and burning to the ground. As I hope is becoming clear, there’s a lot to juggle in your Roman settlement.
While all this is happening, you also juggle resources. Every building has initial and ongoing costs to keep it in operation. Supplies need to get between warehouses and production buildings, so you need to stay on top of road building and space between supplies and warehouses. Pax Romana does offer some help in this regard. It shows the range of buildings when selected, and when you do goose it up, it will alert you to buildings that are at a standstill because they’re out of supplies or lacking workers.
There’s a useful resource view that shows your overall incomings and outgoings. I wish I’d noticed it sooner. I was so caught up in expansion that I didn’t even notice I was running at a huge loss. Thankfully, in the demo I played, a benevolent entity bailed me out of my 10,000 gold debt, and then one of the developers in the room, eager to help, gave me some advice on how to keep things on track.
The developers have promised so much more than I even got to see. Religious deities that can provide boons to your populace, a Celtic-inspired people who, depending on your actions, might or might not be receptive to ing you, and a full campaign inspired by history, but entirely fictional, with different governors to play as and various challenges to overcome.
I got to play for the better part of four hours. It’s a long session for a game, but I got the impression that I’m barely scratching the surface of what’s going to be on offer in the full game. What I know for sure is that I am excited to spend some more time in this warm, inviting world that walks a fine line between history and fantasy.
Hopefully, I don’t go so deep into debt the second time around.
Anno 117: Pax Romana is expected to launch in 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
